Sunday Mornings
by piratejenn
Summary: “I love you” certainly loses its prowess when it’s thrown around as an exaggerated form of gratitude, or as a hasty teenage sentiment. He had told her often enough that he loved her, but he always felt that Stacy deserved better.


**DISCLAIMER:** I'm a poor, broke college student. If I had that kind of money, I'm not sure I'd – no, I probably would buy House, MD. Alas, 'tis not the case, and so I toil.  
**NOTES:** This is the a songfic based off of/inspired by Snow Patrol's "Chasing Cars." Thanks go tomy beta for putting up with me, and Gary Lightbody for the musical and lyrical brilliance. The lines takenly directly from the episode are, needless to say, not mine.

* * *

_I don't quite know  
How to say  
How I feel_

Few people could boast of being able to render Gregory House speechless. Stacy was one of those people. Not thinking-of-a-comeback-settling-for-"No"-Cameron-I-don't-love-you speechless…but complete, total, no-words-coming-out-of-the-mouth-whatsoever speechless.

How do you express complete and utter trust, fulfillment and awe in another human being, anyway? He never thought he believed it possible to feel that way until he met her, and he would never believe it possible to feel that way again. She was the only person who could read his impossibly encrypted face and give voice to his thoughts before he finished thinking them. However, her powers used to habitually fail her every Sunday, while her Greg-o-Meter was temporarily out of service for weekly recharging.

They used to have a ritual of lounging well into the afternoon, tangled together on the couch with steaming cups of coffee, he perusing The New York Times, she savoring that week's issue of The New Yorker. (New York, he decided, had a monopoly on quality periodicals.) A pile of discarded sections would mount on the floor below, and the coffee pot would empty itself, somehow. Amid this lazy Sunday ritual, House used to have his own, private ritual of staring at Stacy over the edge of his newspaper, hidden just enough so that she wouldn't notice when she broke her concentration for a sip of coffee.

_Those three words  
Are said too much  
They're not enough_

One word used to always edge its way into his consciousness, closely followed by an urge to give verbal life to its three-word derivative. How could "love" include all of the feelings and emotions that coursed through him? It felt woefully inadequate – one all-encompassing word and one three-word phrase to communicate the tug he felt in his gut, the way his heart skipped a beat sometimes, the contentment he felt, the everything and anything he had learned and realized. "I love you" just didn't cut it.

The tragedy of language is that misuse and overuse of words make them meaningless. "Awesome" is no longer awesome. "Totally" is too all-encompassing. What does "cool" mean, anyway? "I love you" certainly loses its prowess when it's thrown around as an exaggerated form of gratitude, or as a hasty teenage sentiment. He had told her often enough that he loved her, but he always felt that Stacy deserved better.

_If I lay here  
If I just lay here  
Would you lie with me and just forget the world?_

In between articles and editorials on O. J.'s trial, Bosnia, Mir and how the world would never be the same without Jerry Garcia, House used to think about her, about them, about how nothing in the world – the world he read about in the paper, the world he called home – felt more right than Sunday mornings.

_All that I am  
All that I ever was  
Is here in your perfect eyes, they're all I can see_

She immediately smiled as he came through the door and into her office. He didn't want to do this, didn't want to break that smile, didn't want to give her up after trying so hard to get her back. Okay, so he hadn't known when she showed up in the clinic that he would actually want her back. But, the past few days had felt reminiscent of their lazy Sunday mornings. Those same few days added to the pain this was going to cause him…puh, his leg felt great, in comparison.

"Hey," she said, a playfully sexy look on her face.

"Hi," he replied, a nervously dumb smile on his.

Five years was not long enough to forget her beautiful elegance. (Eternity didn't have a chance, either, by the way.) It was long enough to forget how perfect her rich brown eyes were, though. They were a microcosm of everything he was once able to call his own and everything he was about to lose for the second time. Now, as he stared into them – oh no, she said she's going to talk to Mark - they reflected his image back to him in a concave distorted picture of stubble, tousled hair and an impossibly conspicuous cane-like appendage.

"Don't do it," he said, quietly.

_I don't know where  
Confused about how as well  
Just know that these things will never change for us at all_

Stacy kept returning his admissions and points with equally good ones – damn her for being a lawyer. His mind was racing, flashing back to Sunday mornings ten years ago and the rooftop mere hours ago. She was making this harder, even though it wasn't easy to begin with. "It isn't easy, but it is simple," he had told her that morning, as they watched the sunrise.

"I can't make you happy!" he finally burst, realizing that it was as simple as that.

"What?"

"How do you think this is gonna end? We'll be happy for what? A few weeks, a few months. And then, I'll say something insensitive, or I'll start ignoring you. And, at first, it'll be okay. It's just House being House. And then at some point, you will need something more. You'll need someone who can give you something I can't."

He wasn't going to change; he wasn't even sure if he could. What House was sure of was that she deserved better, just like she had deserved better than a common three-word phrase.

_If I lay here  
If I just lay here  
Would you lie with me and just forget the world?_


End file.
